April 17, 2012 -- Advantech Corp. and Ittiam Systems, Ltd. have announced the availability of a new high-density audio-transcoding platform on Advantech's DSPC-8681 card based on four TMS320C6678 multicore DSPs from Texas Instruments, Inc.This platform sets new levels of performance in channel density and transcoding throughput in a half-length PCIe form factor.

"The combination of Ittiam's production-proven audio-processing codecs optimized for TI's C6678 multicore DSPs and Advantech's PCIe cards results in a highly scalable solution for OEMs," said David Lin, Director DSP Solutions, Advantech."The availability of such a high-performance audio-processing platform in an industry-standard form factor will help accelerate integration and development times."

Advantech's DSPC-8681 is capable of transcoding multiple channels of audio and video, and it provides the hardware foundation for a wide variety of media codecs.

Ittiam's software systems for broadcast applications are available for licensing as software development kits (SDKs) with defined application programming interfaces (APIs) on TI's C667x multicore DSPs. The SDKs include a multimedia framework, middleware and codecs. The codecs include both highly optimized video and audio codecs for various formats and other video- and audio-processing algorithms. Running on Advantech's DSPC-8681, Ittiam's audio SDK can transcode 400+ channels of MPEG-1 Layer II to AAC.

Advantech's DSPC-8681 Media Engine integrates four TI C6678 multicore DSPs, the PLX ExpressLane PEX8624 PCIe Gen 2 switch, and the Xilinx XC3S200AN Spartan-3 FPGA to achieve the highest possible performance levels in a half-length PCIe form factor. High-speed inter-DSP communications provide low-latency interconnects for scalable real-time multi-processing and connect to the host through a high-bandwidth PCIe x8 gen 2 interface. Based on the same design as the quad DSP card, Advantech's DSPC-8682 extends the form factor to full-length PCIe to accommodate eight TI C6678 multicore DSPs, providing a significant leap forward in multicore density and processing performance.

Ittiam's software framework will run on both the DSPC-8681 and DSPC-8682, allowing OEMs to build scalable solutions for a wide range of channel densities. By deploying solutions based on advanced media-processing hardware today, OEMs can leverage the benefits of an all-software approach to extend their product lifecycles through new software enhancements in the future.